2 June 2014

In the first decade of Telangana's existence, the new state government launched Mission Bhagiratha to provide safe drinking water to every household in Telangana, addressing the fluorosis crisis in Nalgonda and the water scarcity that had defined Mahbubnagar and other districts. It launched Rythu Bandhu, providing direct investment support to farmers who had been left entirely to their own resources for five decades. It launched Kaleshwaram, the largest lift irrigation project in the world, to irrigate the lands through which the Krishna and Godavari had flowed without adequately serving Telangana's farmers. It established new universities, new medical colleges, new welfare schemes for Dalits through the Dalit Bandhu programme, for minorities through the Shaadi Mubarak scheme, for women through the Kalyana Lakshmi scheme, and for the poor through the double bedroom housing scheme.

That voice, which KCR had founded a party in 2001 to create, which Prof. Jayashankar had spent a lifetime building the intellectual foundation for, which the people of Telangana had marched for in their millions, was finally, permanently and constitutionally its own. The 29th state of India. The state of Telangana. Free at last to govern itself, to spend its own revenues, to irrigate its own fields, to give its own children the jobs and education that had been denied them for two generations. The long struggle was over. The reconstruction had begun.